A large proportion of businesses now have a dedicated IT department or as a minimum an in-house IT specialist who outsources certain IT tasks to contractors, and one of the most valuable aspects of this team will be coders and developers. The problem with this skill is that it is not one which can always be accurately reflected in a CV and the reality is that anyone can claim to have coding abilities. Many companies have discovered to their chagrin that those hot shot coders they have employed are actually unable to perform the most basic of tasks given to them and this is not the kind of surplus staff anyone wants on their workforce. This is true of many skill sets needed across many sectors.

Remote interviewing is a brilliant way of establishing at the interview stage just who actually possesses the skills they claim to have. For example, a coder must be able to do their job quickly and accurately to keep the business running smoothly and being able to assess one’s aptitude at the interview stage is a godsend to us all. Remote interviewing can also be employed across the board for all manner of recruitment, saving a lot of time, money and hassle down the line. In short, this process gives us the opportunity to completely address the way we carry out recruitment.

Rather than following the traditional route of inviting the most promising candidates into the office for their interview you conduct part of it remotely. Within the realms of this platform we as recruiters have the chance of assigning tasks to every interviewee and actually watch how they carry this out. We effectively watch them code in real time and thus remove any doubts about how efficiently they can deal with an impromptu task which, as we all know, happens all too often in the IT department. Watching how they work and how quickly they create the new code also gives us a much better idea of how they will perform in the workplace should we decide to employ them.

Save Valuable Time by Pre-screening

Anyone in recruitment will tell you that the worst part of the job is trawling through the multitude of CV’s which pour in for every IT vacancy. Of course we would rather have too many than not enough but at the same time this is a time consuming task. The remote interview platform also gives you the benefit of pre-screening before you even start to read them. Programme in key skills or qualifications and those without them will be eliminated. You can choose from a preset screening programme or create your own and the system thereby automatically credits every candidate a score based on how close their skills match your criteria. This helps greatly in assessing who will be invited for a remote interview as, on paper anyway, you have the best candidates for the job.

So Who Benefits From Remote Interviewing?

In short we all do. The recruiter benefits from the laborious task of deciding who gets an interview being made so much quicker and effective. The company knows firsthand if the claims on the CV match those the candidate actually possesses and the interviewee gets more of an insight into the tasks that will be involved in the job and whether it’s what they are looking for. There are few win win situations in recruitment but remote interviewing must be right up there.

About The Author

Sam Rice is a senior consultant working with IT recruitment specialists Applause IT www.applauseit.co.uk.